By Eric Le Roy
Content 18+ I spotted an article today while scanning early morning updates on the world’s disasters, and it made me remember something I hadn’t thought about in years. According to this story, the big Greyhound bus terminal in Chicago is closing, and this means trouble for those who depend, not only on intercity Greyhound service but on urban-suburban transport buses in general. I started thinking about the old days and of all the things that are now fading from the landscape of American memory and the many that already have. They take the past with them when they go, so I guess that means they take most of me, right?
I haven’t visited the States in many years (no visits are imminent); however, free of the stress of actually living there, I catch myself missing America in incremental yet powerful doses of ‘how it was’. .. Some of those memories involve days and nights aboard Greyhound buses. There was another long distance company called Trailways, but maybe it’s gone the way of K-Mart – I wouldn’t know without digging for it.
I wasn’t hatched out into this world as a poor boy or an orphan, but the gift for making regrettable decisions apparently was born in me, blossoming in my strangely seedy soul among the alleys I went through when some urge compelled me to abandon the huckleberries and wildflowers that tried to call my name – and sponsoring me later in my lust for gratifying transient desires.
As a result – and while the years began to pass – I was sometimes out of pocket. But I knew I could always scrape up enough loose change to ‘hop a bus’, as the phrase went. I hopped on a lot of them. And you could go anywhere in those days. There was no ‘end of the line’ on a Greyhound bus.
But, truth be told, they weren’t all that comfortable. Sure, you could crank the seat back (but not too far because it would piss the person behind you off), yet the real problem was the headrest. Now if you’ve ever sat on a sofa with bulbous cushions behind you and no ‘give’ in them, you’ll have some idea what I mean. Your body wants to slouch back, but the back of your head remains pinioned, as if to the end of a boxing glove. After a while your neck begins to ache.
For some reason, I always used to think of those women in Africa who keep putting rings around their necks to make them stretch longer and longer. (Decidedly exotic on some of the beautiful ones, but I always wondered what would happen if they took them off and then bent over to pick up a fallen ruby. Crash! )The Greyhound headrests produced the same effect; when we stopped somewhere to let everyone pee and grab a sandwich, I would always flex my head about, rotating it until the stiffness left.
The other uncomfortable thing was the windows, which were very big and unyielding when, to escape the headrest, you tilted your skull against the glass. I can remember dropping off into a Greyhound-trance, which was never quite registering as Sleep and in fact left me feeling worse when I snapped out of it. ‘Groggy’ is the best way to describe it. I’d look out and think that it must be raining until I realized that it was my own drool sliding down. But from those windows you had a clear enough view of America.
In the daytime you saw what is true of any modern country: a certain repetition of the open highway and its carbon copy rest areas, hotels, motels, restaurants, and service stations that represent, I suppose, the country’s character at least as much as its skyscrapers, mountains, rivers and canyons. This was a modern version of the open road, the one Keruoac made famous, that Simon and Garfunkel captured in a song they sang at Central Park, another one that Willie Nelson still sings about, and that the great American football commentator John Madden cherished so much. The sense of leaving somewhere and going somewhere else. Not like a bandit or a tarred-and-feathered outcast, but just because something inside you said, “Let’s move, Ole Buddy”. This crazy idea of ‘finding’ America.
Just floating across an America with no beginning and no end, just as you stuck with the fearful freedom of meeting yourself, not really belonging anywhere – had no beginning and no end. I would look at the telephone poles that lined the narrowing roads heading toward small towns, and I would imagine voices traveling back and forth across those phones. A million billion conversations that only the telephone lines could hear. Sometimes I envied the loud secrets, and wished I was a lonely telephone pole like a scarecrow on some country road…somewhere. I guess it was because I could think of no better definition of myself. I was a telephone pole on the outskirts of a small town, listening to everything, laughing at it, crying a little. Well I was that kind of telephone pole, you see.
I loved the nights of cities and towns. The great cities under the gems and costume jewelry of the glittering ‘after hours’ used to leave me wondering about stupid things: how many people out of these millions were sitting on the toilet, having sex, abusing something or someone, maybe themselves, writing songs that we would hear some day or that would die with them, exterminated in their throats like dead eggs…. It was night theater unfolding in mind and my guide was the Greyhound bus, my fellow theater aficionados the weary, impatient, inquisitive audience, clapping silently with hands that never left their pockets.
This then was the glorious cheapness of the Rhinestone night. But, strangely, I never wanted to be in the high towering symbols of power and success with some trophy lady emblem. No, I always imagined myself picking up some woman whose face was a map of the city’s soul, and who would lead me somewhere I feared and wanted to go to, where the hoodlums would look at me with predatory eyes but let me pass for a price and the wink of the woman, into a room. Some room. Somewhere, Among those lost streets. That was always my dream.
Strange guy.
What else I remember was the Greyhound stations themselves. You should be informed that nobody chose to ‘Go Greyhound’ if they could afford to ‘go’ a different way. So the stations fell into one of two categories. Feckless small town buildings where you just went outside and stood there, like a farmer praying for rain or a thief hoping there’d be no sign of the cops, until finally, you saw it coming, as welcome as a mail order bride, churning into your midst. Everybody – sometimes not many – would have to make up their minds if they had time to finish their cigarettes (usually they did) before showing their tickets and boarding —
OR, you’d find yourself in a crowded station, sometimes even without an available seat. That was the time to enjoy your smoke and look at people just as tarnished as you were – people who didn’t notice you except out the corners of their eye, who didn’t care about you, and who were just trying to get somewhere they hoped wouldn’t be as sour as where they were leaving from, though they knew: “Prob’ly it will.” There was a matter-of-factness in every movement, even in the ripples of wrinkles born of a silently savage commonplaceness that dogged their days and turned out the shadows of which their human faces were constituted: a defiant despair.
And I was part of all that, and I was both the poet who blindly ‘loved’ them and also the
willing prisoner of all their days, because, while they were trying to break out, I was just as busy trying to break into the gray stations of their lives. I don’t know what I was looking for. But Greyhound was willing to take me there, at least to the doorsteps of those enigmatic, ambiguous places.
I’ll never know why. For me the Greyhound bus in America will always be a “Ticket to Ride” and a tour guide to the Gates of America where I always somehow felt like a bystander, an entrepreneur of darkness. I entered all the wavering tunnels, but even the hobos, as well as the professors, knew immediately that I was a stranger who didn’t belong.
Young people can’t be expected to know this yet, but when you get old you tend to feel – as I think it natural to feel – a nostalgia for things you didn’t particularly like when they were there right in front of you and a part of the daily routine. Telephone booths, old style phones hanging on the wall in your house (some with ‘party lines so you could stifle your breath with a damp washcloth and listen to the neighbors’ gossip, a black and white TV with an antenna on top, hulking typewriters that were always a forbidding Dickensian black, cars that all had gear shifts.
I could go on; moreover, I could romanticize those and many other things of that Third World Foreign Nation which is the Past, but in truth, most of them were a pain in the ass. The biggest number of us were always dreaming of improvements, though exactly what improvements remained a mystery. Nobody I knew ever said, “What we need, Goddammit, is a COMPUTER.” We just knew that there had to be something better than what we were stuck with. For us, a ‘highway’ was a two lane strip of asphalt with a white line in the middle and cars going in opposite directions. Passing slow traffic on the mountain roads of West Virginia was Russian roulette if you did it rounding a curve.
I’ll say this. The Greyhound bus always knew how to figure it out. I never in all those years ever saw a single driver who didn’t look exactly like all the rest of them, but I am sure they had their lives, all burning, I like to think, with some kind of intensity, God knows what for. They looked like the towns and cities they steered us through. Didn’t matter if it was North Carolina or Iowa or Oregon, they were all the same, the drivers and the places we left and went to. You got off one bus and onto another. Or, at the end of the line in a world where the line never ended, you wandered off down some street you knew or didn’t know.
It is the funniest thing in my whole goddamned life that, now, in the ashes of the years, I like those guys. I like those places. I miss the roads we traveled on, from nowhere to nowhere, and I miss – how odd it is – casual action and eternal emptiness of those fond days. Truth be told, If I met those people, protagonists of the dark seats on the bus or in the waiting rooms at the station, I wouldn’t have any idea what to say.
